Rumors from the beginning of the week pegged September 21 as the day that Google’s Allo messenger would finally arrive and those rumors appear to be correct. Moments ago, Google pushed live the new Allo website and a promotional video, both of which have links to Google Play and iTunes as if the app is available […]

Rumors from the beginning of the week pegged September 21 as the day that Google’s Allo messenger would finally arrive and those rumors appear to be correct. Moments ago, Google pushed live the new Allo website and a promotional video, both of which have links to Google Play and iTunes as if the app is available to be downloaded. (EDIT: SEE BELOW!)

It’s not available just yet, though. If you click through the Google Play link below, you should see the old Allo listing that allows you to register for updates. If you click through an iOS/iTunes link, a message pops up to let you know that the app isn’t available yet.

Because the app will more than likely go live very soon, we’ll be sure to update this post.

Anyone seeing it available for installation? If so, give us that .apk.

Twitter didn’t abandon their 140-character limit for tweets today, but they did make it much easier for you to get your message across while tweeting and sharing other things. Starting today, photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and quote tweets no longer count towards the 140 character limit within a tweet. Yay! Say more about what's happening! […]

Twitter didn’t abandon their 140-character limit for tweets today, but they did make it much easier for you to get your message across while tweeting and sharing other things. Starting today, photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and quote tweets no longer count towards the 140 character limit within a tweet.

The folks who once worked for Sunrise announced this morning that their popular calendar app is now dead. It’s dead because Microsoft bought them and has decided to no longer support the app and instead infuse Sunrise’s brilliance into Outlook, a subpar email app. Today, we are getting a glimpse into the future of Sunrise […]

The folks who once worked for Sunrise announced this morning that their popular calendar app is now dead. It’s dead because Microsoft bought them and has decided to no longer support the app and instead infuse Sunrise’s brilliance into Outlook, a subpar email app. Today, we are getting a glimpse into the future of Sunrise integrated into Outlook, though most of the goodness is only available to a really small group of users. Most of us, if we are using Outlook, won’t see this stuff for a while.

Microsoft is finally building in Interesting Calendars, one of the standout features of Sunrise that allowed you to add to your calendar items like upcoming games for your favorite sports teams. Microsoft will soon add TV shows to Interesting Calendar options, but for now, sports is it. This new feature is available today to Outlook users on iOS who happen to have an Office 365 email address. No Android user can see this feature yet, nor can anyone with an Outlook.com, Gmail, or other email address. Outlook.com access should come “later this year,” but the rest of the world shouldn’t expect it any time soon. Sweet!

As for other new features, Microsoft has built in updated date and time pickers, though those are only available on iOS at the moment. This new look will arrive on Android “soon.”

They have also built in Maps suggestions as you type locations, new icons to represent agenda items, recurring meeting item updates, and Skype for Business integration.

Have fun, Outlook users, when you get your new features on Android in a year. (Yes, I’m a bit salty.)

Google’s Duo, the 1-on-1 video chatting app that was first introduced to the world back at Google I/O, is now available globally. Well, it’ll be rolling out starting now, but you may not be able to install right away. (EDIT: It’s available now!) With Duo, to recap, you get an incredibly simple video calling app […]

Google’s Duo, the 1-on-1 video chatting app that was first introduced to the world back at Google I/O, is now available globally. Well, it’ll be rolling out starting now, but you may not be able to install right away. (EDIT: It’s available now!)

With Duo, to recap, you get an incredibly simple video calling app that is only for performing 1-on-1 chats with friends, family, and whoever else you have a phone number for. And yes, you do indeed need a phone number in order to use Duo, as that is the means for signing up. Once you have done that, though, video calling someone is as easy as tapping their name in a contact list.

Other features in Duo include Knock Knock, which shoes you a live video of the person calling you, so you know just what kinds of dirty acts fun they are up to. Google is also making sure you can video chat at all times by making Duo “fast and reliable,” with adjustments on the fly to tweak call quality and hand-off between WiFi and cellular networks. Lastly, Duo calls are end-to-end encrypted.

As of right now, Duo is still showing for me as open for registration rather than for installs, so we’ll update this post when it finally goes live.

UPDATE: The app is now available on Google Play! If you aren’t seeing it, we have the .apk for you below as well.

You played Pokemon GO this weekend, right? If you say “no,” I don’t know that I can believe you. Even me, the guy who spent 30 mins on Friday’s DL Show talking about how little I know or understand about Pokemon, installed Pokemon GO and nabbed a Pokemon or three from within my living room […]

You played Pokemon GO this weekend, right? If you say “no,” I don’t know that I can believe you.

Even me, the guy who spent 30 mins on Friday’s DL Show talking about how little I know or understand about Pokemon, installed Pokemon GO and nabbed a Pokemon or three from within my living room within the past couple of days. Everywhere I went over the weekend, which included a toddler party on Saturday, there were people talking about it. Yes, the parents at the toddler party, many of whom are old like me, talked Pokemon GO for lengthy periods of time. Honestly, I think some were counting the minutes until their child was headed for bed so that they could run around their neighborhood with phones up, tossing balls in AR to creatures from their past that are back and taking the world once again by storm.

So we want to know, because there is no denying the level of buzz surrounding this game at the moment, how many of you spent some time playing Pokemon GO this weekend? If you did spend some time, be sure to head over to this giveaway we are doing to show off your collection – you could win some Play credit!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

P.S. – I still don’t understand it at all, even after reading Eric’s sweet Pokemon GO tips and tricks posts from earlier. I guess I should get to learning.

Slack, the team workplace chatting service that only tech nerd press seem to drool over constantly, every day, on Twitter, as if they are the “In” crowd because they use Slack and you don’t, rolled out a calls feature to all yesterday, after having been in beta for months. Not familiar with Slack? That’s OK! Not […]

Slack, the team workplace chatting service that only tech nerd press seem to drool over constantly, every day, on Twitter, as if they are the “In” crowd because they use Slack and you don’t, rolled out a calls feature to all yesterday, after having been in beta for months.

Not familiar with Slack? That’s OK! Not everyone is tech nerd press who live in a bubble of obnoxious tech elitism and feel like they need to tell you each time that Slack receives an update, that “this is the app our team uses!” It really is just a workplace or team or group chat app (it’s on Android, iOS, Chrome, and desktop) that has a lot of really neat features that make it a powerful tool that you may talk about incessantly, assuming you like to get excited about your team workplace chat apps. I know I don’t!

As for the newish calls feature, it does exactly what you would expect it to do – place calls to people within Slack. Slack says that anyone can now make one-on-one calls, while “paid teams can also make group calls in any channel or group DM.” You’ll now see phone icons throughout apps, be able to react with emoji during calls, and feel a part of the “In” Slack crowd who have been testing calls for a while in the beta, bro.

Try not to get mad at what I’m about to say, but Google released another iOS-exclusive app today. I’m sorry! I’m just the news deliverer! Would it help if I told you that we could see the technology from this app on Android? Better? OK, let’s talk about the app. It’s called Motion Stills and it […]

Try not to get mad at what I’m about to say, but Google released another iOS-exclusive app today. I’m sorry! I’m just the news deliverer! Would it help if I told you that we could see the technology from this app on Android? Better? OK, let’s talk about the app.

It’s called Motion Stills and it allows users of iPhones that shoot Live Photos (the short video clips taken before and after pictures in the iPhone camera) to turn them into easily shareable GIFs. It’s probably awesome. It also uses some video stabilization magic to make them super cool.

Here, check out a few of Google’s examples.

See how it goes from shaky disaster to stabilized work of art? Yeah, that’s Google puttin’ in work on the stabilization algorithm or something. Need a better explanation? This is the foreign language spoken throughout the app’s announcement post where Googlers try and tell us how this all works:

We pioneered this technology by stabilizing hundreds of millions of videos and creating GIF animations from photo bursts. Our algorithm uses linear programming to compute a virtual camera path that is optimized to recast videos and bursts as if they were filmed using stabilization equipment, yielding a still background or creating cinematic pans to remove shakiness.

Our challenge was to take technology designed to run distributed in a data center and shrink it down to run even faster on your mobile phone. We achieved a 40x speedup by using techniques such as temporal subsampling, decoupling of motion parameters, and using Google Research’s custom linear solver, GLOP. We obtain further speedup and conserve storage by computing low-resolution warp textures to perform real-time GPU rendering, just like in a videogame.

Again, the app is currently only available to iPhones, which makes a lot of sense since they are the only phones that shoot Live Photos. Yeah, I know, there are other phones that shoot Live Photo-esque clips, but it was probably easy for Google to focus on the iPhone here to try and perfect this new tech. On that note, Google perfecting the tech is exactly how it comes to Android.

According to a blog post announcing Motion Stills, the Googlers involved said that this app is really just an experiment and a way for them to “iterate quickly on the technology needed for short video creation,” but that their “hope” is to integrate the feature (making short videos into awesomely stabilized GIFs) into Google Photos. See, it could come to Android…because we have Google Photos!

To help boost the amount of users making purchases through Samsung Pay, Samsung is reportedly working on an extension to the existing Samsung Pay platform that will be available to both Android and iOS devices, as well as online for desktop users. According to industry insiders, this Samsung Pay extension could launch as early as June. […]

To help boost the amount of users making purchases through Samsung Pay, Samsung is reportedly working on an extension to the existing Samsung Pay platform that will be available to both Android and iOS devices, as well as online for desktop users. According to industry insiders, this Samsung Pay extension could launch as early as June.

To recap Samsung Pay as a whole, it is a bit different from what is offered by Google (Android Pay) and Apple (Apple Pay). As of right now, only select Galaxy device owners can use Samsung Pay in stores, and it is also limited to whichever banks support it. The list of supported banks is growing, but there are still plenty that do not. If you do have a supported bank and smartphone, users can upload banking and credit card info into Samsung Pay, then pay for goods at almost any retailer in the US, as long as there is a MS-powered credit card terminal. Samsung Pay does not entirely run off of NFC (Android Pay and Apple Pay do), so it allows users to benefit from the service in more places.

More importantly, both Apple Pay and Android Pay heavily support online payments through 3rd-party applications. This is the area where Samsung is playing catch up and this reported extension is Samsung’s investment into that online payments realm.

Think of this possible extension as a counter to PayPal online. When checking out inside of an online store, or even through a mobile app, many retailers grant the option to use PayPal for hassle-free payments. Your banking and credit card info is already stored on PayPal, which makes the payment experience much quicker. This same experience is what Samsung is reportedly going for. By offering Samsung Pay more broadly online, as well as to virtually all Android users and iPhone owners, the company can grow the amount of users exponentially.

Details regarding partners and concrete launch timeframe are unknown, but it seems that Samsung wants to launch as quickly as possible. Of course, nothing has been made official by the company yet.

If you are a current Samsung Pay user, could you see yourself using Samsung Pay for more online desktop purchases?

]]>http://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/27/samsung-pay-online/feed/20Google Spaces is a New Group Sharing App With Built-In Chrome, Search, and YouTube (Updated)http://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/16/google-spaces-app-android-ios/
http://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/16/google-spaces-app-android-ios/#commentsMon, 16 May 2016 15:44:26 +0000http://www.droid-life.com/?p=186335

To kick off Monday, Google went ahead and gave us a new app to try out, called Google Spaces. As the name sort of suggests, it’s a bit of group messaging or sharing app that revolves around specific “spaces” or topics that you’d like to discuss with friends or family or co-workers. Google is calling […]

To kick off Monday, Google went ahead and gave us a new app to try out, called Google Spaces. As the name sort of suggests, it’s a bit of group messaging or sharing app that revolves around specific “spaces” or topics that you’d like to discuss with friends or family or co-workers. Google is calling it a “better group sharing experience,” so again, the goal is to get you sharing information with others about topics. Did we need an app like this? I don’t know!

With Spaces, which we are still waiting to go live on Android, iOS, and Chrome, Google has built-in Search, YouTube, and Chrome to allow you to find items (like videos or web pages) to be shared and then quickly searched through to find other or older items too, perhaps mentioned topics deep in the past of a Space.

In the screenshots currently available from Google, they are suggesting spaces for topics like group trips to Paris, study sessions with fellow students, a comic book club, kitchen remodels, a space for college buddies to bro-out in, or parenting tips. It’s not a difficult idea to understand, right? You have this app for sharing topics with others who have interest in a topic.

If you are attending Google I/O, Google says to install Spaces because they plan to create a space for each I/O session so that “developers can connect with each other and Googlers around topics” at the conference.

Once Spaces goes live, we’ll be sure to share those direct links to Android and iOS. For now, feel free to cruise around the Chrome landing page and preview some of the fun.

]]>http://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/16/google-spaces-app-android-ios/feed/47Dark Sky Weather App Arrives on Android With a Subscription Model That Few are Happy Abouthttp://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/13/dark-sky-android-subscription/
http://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/13/dark-sky-android-subscription/#commentsFri, 13 May 2016 15:12:31 +0000http://www.droid-life.com/?p=186293

Dark Sky launched on Android this week to the delight of weather obsessed former iOS users who made their way to the intelligent side of mobile. While the app isn’t exactly a beacon of Material Design newness, it’s very much like its Apple-originated counterpart and should be familiar to fans. With that said, the pricing […]

Dark Sky launched on Android this week to the delight of weather obsessed former iOS users who made their way to the intelligent side of mobile. While the app isn’t exactly a beacon of Material Design newness, it’s very much like its Apple-originated counterpart and should be familiar to fans. With that said, the pricing model isn’t like it is on iOS and is rubbing Android users the wrong way.

The weather app, like the popular iOS version, includes down-to-the-minute “hyperlocal” rain forecasts, the advanced notifications, and “accurate” 24-hour and 7-day forecasts. It has the beautiful maps too. It’s very much built to be like the iOS version, only now for Android too, which the team behind it says has always been the number one request. Oh, there are widgets as well, because this is Android, dammit, and we love widgets.

So what’s up with the pricing that is irritating our Android brethren? On iOS, you can buy Dark Sky with a one-time payment of $3.99. That payment gets you full access to the app, with those timely notifications and the other benefits that make Dark Sky such a good app. On Android, Dark Sky has decided to conduct an “experiment.” Mmmm, experiments almost always mean something you won’t like, right?

The experiment is to offer a free version of Dark Sky that acts like a standard weather app you could download in 100 different places from 100 different developers. To unlock the good features (like the notifications, alerts, minute-by-minute forecasts, and widgets), you’ll need to pay a yearly $2.99 subscription. See the problem here for Android users?

According to the early reviews of Dark Sky, people aren’t exactly happy about having to keep paying $2.99 per year for access to the same app and services that iOS users get to pay a one-time $3.99 fee for. Seriously, go take a look at the reviews. As of right now, 1-star reviews are dominating the listing and almost all reference the pricing model or “experiment.”

Of course, I have some thoughts on this idea. In Dark Sky’s blog post to announce the arrival on Android, they make mention of finally being able to create an Android app because they grew their resources to the point where they can do it “right” and also continue to support it going forward. In other words, this is probably a small outfit who doesn’t have a couple of hundred million in the bank and 100 employees to make their weather app always awesome. In order to survive and continue to support both iOS and Android, and add new features, getting paid going forward on a continual basis is probably crucial.

Now, I know that people hate this idea of having to continually pay for something when we have all been trained to pay for apps once, own them for life, and expect forever and ever support and new features. Honestly, that may not be fair or sustainable to a lot of developers. You may recall Action Launcher creator Chris Lacy charging everyone again for Action Launcher 3 and people freaking out a bit. He stood by his decision because like many of you, the dude needs to feed his family and providing a lifetime worth of updates and new features on an app that isn’t producing new money is probably not a reality.

Does it suck that the Android app is different from the iOS version in terms of how you pay for it? Yeah, I get that. But maybe we all need to think about how our favorite apps can continue to receive support and the idea that a one-off payment isn’t going to cut in any longer. I don’t know the company structure or size of Dark Sky, so this isn’t me sticking up for their “experiment,” this is just a conversation over all paid apps that we probably need to start talking about.

And now my morning chat with myself is over, feel free to check out Dark Sky.

Back in April of 2012, big things happened. The walled city of Instagram was no longer exclusive to those with an iPhone, and let me tell you, existing citizens of that city were not too happy. In fact, many folks took to social media to decry Instagram’s support of Android. One comment posted to Twitter reads, […]

Back in April of 2012, big things happened. The walled city of Instagram was no longer exclusive to those with an iPhone, and let me tell you, existing citizens of that city were not too happy. In fact, many folks took to social media to decry Instagram’s support of Android. One comment posted to Twitter reads, “Instagram is now available for Android phones. Now I’m going to be forced to see what poor people eat for dinner.”

Interestingly enough, at the exact same time, many Android users didn’t understand the hype surrounding the release. Even on this site, one reader said, “I don’t care about lame, overused, and utterly useless photo filters.” Oh, good sir, Instagram is so much more than just photo filters, and only 4 years later are we really seeing how big Instagram has become. Remember, Facebook thought Instagram was worth $1 billion back in 2012, and only a couple of years later in 2014, Citigroup valued Instagram at $35 billion. Now, in 2016, the service only seems to keep growing and adding new features. Pretty good for a service that only lets you add filters to photos and share them, right?

Let’s take a moment to reflect on a few of the comments made when the app launched for Android.

Anyone wanna bet on how many of these people rock an Android phone now? Statistically speaking, at least a few of them probably do.

As the years have passed, I’d say iOS users have become a bit friendlier towards Android users on Instagram, especially since Android isn’t known as the budget-friendly, shitty camera quality OS anymore. We have expensive phones, too, you know!

]]>http://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/12/tbt-instagram-android/feed/103Poll: Do You Still Buy Music?http://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/12/poll-still-buy-music/
http://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/12/poll-still-buy-music/#commentsThu, 12 May 2016 18:55:10 +0000http://www.droid-life.com/?p=186267

Pretty simple question, right? If you are wondering about the timing, it’s because the internet media fumbled and slobbered all over itself yesterday when a report surfaced suggesting that Apple was going to kill off paid music downloads within the next couple of years. Why would Apple do that, you ask? I think it’s pretty […]

Pretty simple question, right? If you are wondering about the timing, it’s because the internet media fumbled and slobbered all over itself yesterday when a report surfaced suggesting that Apple was going to kill off paid music downloads within the next couple of years. Why would Apple do that, you ask? I think it’s pretty obvious that subscription streaming is the future, or at the very least, these tech companies are going to try to keep convincing you that it is. Apple has already called the report “not true,” but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an interesting idea. Ideas like this, though, are only that if the world has stopped buying music (sales are in decline) and is instead turning to streaming services exclusively. Then again, maybe Apple doesn’t care if you still buy music because they see more money in the long-run with you subscribing to streaming services.

And that brings us back to our poll for the day – do you still buy music? Do you pay for albums online or by physical copies of them? Have you given up buying music and have instead attached yourself to a subscription streaming service like Google Play Music or Apple Music? Do you both buy and pay for streaming? Feel free to answer the simple yes/no question before taking to the comments to explain.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Google released an iOS-only app today called Gboard, a keyboard replacement that does one thing no other keyboard currently does – put the power of Google Search inside of every single app. To say that we are a bit jealous of iOS users right now would probably be an understatement, because this idea of having […]

Google released an iOS-only app today called Gboard, a keyboard replacement that does one thing no other keyboard currently does – put the power of Google Search inside of every single app. To say that we are a bit jealous of iOS users right now would probably be an understatement, because this idea of having Google inside of a keyboard is brilliant. Sure, the app or feature will more than likely come to Android at some point, but we don’t know when. For now, this is another case of iOS users having all the fun.

Since I still happen to have an iPhone 6 lying around these parts, I decided to take Gboard for a spin and share with you the beauty of such a feature. Not to put an additional downer on your day, but yeah, it’s pretty awesome.

In the video below, you’ll see how easily you can share restaurant info, sports scores, funny new YouTube videos, definitions of words, and of course, all the fire emoji one can handle.

]]>http://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/12/video-quick-look-googles-new-gboard-keyboard-ios/feed/41Google’s Gboard is an Awesome New Keyboard for iOS That’s Probably Coming to Androidhttp://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/12/not-cool-google-googles-gboard-awesome-new-keyboard-ios-may-come-android/
http://www.droid-life.com/2016/05/12/not-cool-google-googles-gboard-awesome-new-keyboard-ios-may-come-android/#commentsThu, 12 May 2016 15:11:08 +0000http://www.droid-life.com/?p=186232

Brace yourselves, because you are about to see something really cool that you are going to want on your phone today, only it’s not coming today and is an iOS exclusive at the moment. Don’t ask me why, just know that Google likes to torture us and this is the latest example. Say hello, to […]

Brace yourselves, because you are about to see something really cool that you are going to want on your phone today, only it’s not coming today and is an iOS exclusive at the moment. Don’t ask me why, just know that Google likes to torture us and this is the latest example.

Say hello, to Gboard for iOS!

What is Gboard? Well, you could watch the video and it’ll tell you. If you don’t have time for videos, let me try to explain. Gboard is a new keyboard for iOS that works like any keyboard when it comes to the typing part, or gesture swiping of words. Where it really shines is in this addition of a Google button in its top left corner. That Google button allows you to perform Google searches from within the keyboard and your current app, so that you can then include those Google searches in conversations, without ever leaving your current app. That make any sense?

Think of it like this. You are in Hangouts or WhatsApp or iMessage or Gmail or any other app, and you are talking to someone about a lunch spot or a new movie trailer or you want to share your upcoming flight or hotel reservation details. You can search for those items within the keyboard by tapping the Google button, and then tapping on those search results to get them to appear in the conversation you are having or email you are typing.

Mind blown? Yeah, mine too.

You can also search for emoji, share GIFs, and almost any other search item that Google can come up with. And then you can include them in your conversations.

About that iOS exclusivity. Over on the Gboard listing at Product Hunt, a number of people asked Google why this wasn’t on Android and Bri Connelly, who works on “product @ Google,” said that they are “Working on the best way to bring the same functionality to Android right now!” So yeah, it may come to Android at some point! In fact, that sounds like it will come to Android, we just don’t know when that will be.

Through an update arriving on Android and iOS today, Google is introducing “Goals” to Google Calendar. What are Goals? For now, they seem to be Google’s attempt at helping you workout more or learn a new skill by integrating your exercise and other goals into the app that runs your life – your calendar. With […]

Through an update arriving on Android and iOS today, Google is introducing “Goals” to Google Calendar. What are Goals? For now, they seem to be Google’s attempt at helping you workout more or learn a new skill by integrating your exercise and other goals into the app that runs your life – your calendar.

With Goals, you tell Google what you want to do more of, like workout or go for a run or find time for yoga. Once you specify to Google Calendar what the new goal is, you answer questions to help Calendar find time in your busy schedule.

You can see in the GIFs below how this all works, where you add a goal, which could be workout more in the evening a couple of times per week, and Google then slots in potential workout times where you have openings. You can defer them, mark them as complete, or even schedule items over top. Google says that Calendar will get smarter over time with your goals, as well.

Again, the update to Calendar with Goals included should start rolling out as early as today.